Smart, Analytics driven Team Talent management for your organization: HR 4.0

Myth: Organizations with deep pockets can adopt Talent Assessment as a standard practice.

Reality : Now , every organization can access this practice at fairly reasonable rates and for fairly small teams. In this article, we explore this Talent Management Revolution (HR 4.0).

Talent assessment is a very old practice which started centuries earlier in the Imperial court of China. The British saw this practice and carried it for the Civil Services and slowly, it became a practice for nearly all government jobs across the world. In the last few decades this practice has been adopted in various degrees by private organizations. To quote India’s example, the Tata group holds the TAS exams to recruit a crop of brilliant managers across the group.

Advantages of Talent assessments during hiring are:

1. These assessments provide a uniform measurement framework for all the candidates cutting through any bias and making the selection process neutral.
2. It also allows for a minimum amount of quality control in the candidates who enter the workplace. The technology organizations often use these frameworks in the limited space of skill assessment while we find that industries which have longer duration relationships with their employees i.e., employees spend more than 3 years at an average in the organization, like manufacturing and banking, use the psychometric and cultural assessments.

Advantages of Talent Assessments as a Growth and Learning progression are :

1. Assessments helps the organisation’s People Management team, including Business Managers, to become a mentor and guide to employees (Empathetic Leaders and Managers). It starts with Know Your Employees (KYE) every year (thru assessments), aiding team managers to understand the maturity levels, interests and learning gaps for current role. They can then guide each team member and employee objectively in their career-path and learning-path.
2. Identify the HiPo employees across levels by looking at Current Competency levels and Next Level Competency Potential, using Peer benchmarks.
3. Prioritise Learning needs easily and fast by looking at Gaps between Employee scores and Peer Benchmarking scores in critical-to-productivity attributes. Thus, a Salesperson who is scoring low in Digital Sales should be trained on priority since during COVID digitisation has become an important part of Sales.
4. Leadership fitment and growth-enablement coaching identification, using Industry-specific Leadership Index.

The best news is that every HR Practitioner knows about the Talent Assessments (Psychometric and Skills). Then why is the adoption level low overall even today?

The biggest reason is that its only in the last decade that assessments have gone online — and COVID has surely been the biggest accelerator for Digitisation across industries. This has led to cutting-edge technology deployment in the Assessment companies — include Intelligence Automation technologies like Mobile based assessments, video proctoring, Analytics and Dashboards for Real time reports. Also, the per assessment price has also become very reasonable in the last few years.

Thus, earlier, only players with deep pockets could adopt Talent Assessment as a standard practice. Now , every organisation can access this practice at fairly reasonable rates and for fairly small teams.

Each candidate now, even in remote areas, has a smart phone and when coupled with fraud prevention practices like video proctoring, this makes companies confident to adopt Online Talent Assessments and move into the Industry 4.0 era.

Case Study :

Our client, an IT Products company in Africa, with 600+ employees, had been looking to increase Revenues. The team was struggling to meet 70% of target for the year 2021 (Jan-Dec ’21) . In COVID, they had lost some staff (due to personal reasons) and they were looking to hire expats, mostly from SE Asia (Including India).

Could they understand which combination of psychometric and skills made some of their Sales Team members PERFORMERS, despite COVID? This could help them unlock the reason why other members were lagging in performance and, which Learning Interventions should be undertaken to improve the performance and productivity of the laggards.

There was a set of 22 people who had met or exceeded their targets even in the time of COVID out of the team of 50 Sales people. What were the traits that these 22 people excelled in? Once Identified, they would implement a 2-pronged strategy:

1. Leaning Intervention to improve performance of Sales team
2. Hire more people like their performers (Look alike) .

Find People who ‘Look Alike’ to my Performing Employees

For this, they got 50 people from the current Sales team to take the Competency and Sales Assessment at www.Pexitest.com. The same took 7 days (with daily follow up ) and the HR Manager as well as the Business Head kept a tab on the completion .

At the end of 7 days, PexiTest (www.pexitest.com) held a Report Understanding session with the participants. Individual reports were explained to the participants. Outcome: The participants felt happy to discuss their SWOT analysis and their buy-in into the process depended. They became open to the subsequent Learning sessions.

At the end of 10 days, Pexitics submitted a Consolidated report to the Management. On day 15 there was a discussion on the strength and areas of improvement of the team itself. The CEO attended the session. In conclusion, the organisation decided to ensure that the assessments are done for candidates pre-hiring to ensure that a minimum Skill capability and Competency level is present in all the candidates who come into the interview pipeline. One big shortage of the existing team was Digital Sales capability, and that was an area of focus for up-skilling.

The bill for this additional input at hiring stage was approx. $10 per candidate and the Recruitment consultant was requested to make the assessments from Pexitics (www.pexitest.com) a part of the shortlisting process

Pexitest.com has now been commissioned to undertake the Talent Assessment for other teams!

The Learning Needs Identification for the current Sales team has led to the organization running 3-day upskilling sessions to improve team productivity.

Do you have any queries ? Feel free to reach us at score@pexitics.com or call at +91 7349662321

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